Tag: Painful spot

-“You eat a lot!” …BOOM!… he said it. My head got completely empty and I felt like each ear got covered with an empty glass. All I could hear was that dull ringing sound of vacuum filling my head. I stared at him waiting for some other words, something else I could grab on and continue a conversation. But there was nothing. Ha stared back at me most probably wondering what was wrong.

In fact, he didn’t say anything wrong. I was eating a lot, and it was fine. But he hit my “Painful spot” (PoLR) with precision. This is how it feels. Absolutely innocent comment, not even criticism makes you feel lost and helpless like a fish thrown out of water. In my previous post I promised to share how to deal with that, so here we go:

Accept that people don’t have a purpose to hurt you in 90% of the time, they are just being themselves and they are different from you. Nobody is attacking you, even if it feels like they do. They don’t mean it.

Don’t fire back. Our first reaction naturally will be to defend ourselves by counterstrike. Remember the point #1 and react how you would react if it wasn’t an attack. It will take time to master so don’t kill yourself when you fail, it’s a really touch skill to acquire.

Your mind is very smart. It will protect you and most of the times you won’t provoke discussions on painful subject, cause your mind won’t let you. So do yourself a favor and avoid getting into situations where the subject is the main topic of the event (no cooking shows for me;)

At last I have to mention: be sure that this is your PoLR. Sometimes people say something offensive but if you don’t feel like I described (vacuum in your head and inability to come up with a feedback) thats not PoLR.

So now when we discussed how to act in these frustrating situations, let’s talk about how to train yourself not to get hurt – thats more interesting isn’t it? :) As we already know it is not easy to study a subject of your PoLR, however in small doses you can train yourself and you can strengthen yourself. The first step is to become aware of what your weakness is. Once you become aware you can control the informational intake on the subject as well as you can be more tolerant to others when they accidentally hurt you because truly it’s not their fault: it’s just the way your mind works against the way their mind works and there is nothing wrong with either of them. To do become aware you need to identify your personality type, and – sorry:) – the bad news is: it’s very difficult to do that by yourself and I will explain why later. In the meantime the good news is that I have a little surprise for you. I will help you to find out your type! I will share all the details in my next post so if you’re interested to learn more about yourself stay tuned!

“What is your biggest weakness?” Don’t you just hate this question during the interview? In my head I always have a red siren going on and the voice saying: “Anything you say may be used against you.” Most probably it will indeed be used against you, which is totally unfair. Because your actual biggest weakness is absolutely not what you think it is.

Imagine you wear blue sunglasses and a yellow t-shirt. When you look in the mirror, you will see that your t-shirt is green. Because of the blue filter you will have a distorted perception of colors.

Similar to that we are all wearing “sunglasses” of our socio type. There are certain things which we simply cannot recognize because of that filter. Your biggest weakness is one of them. It’s so weak that you won’t be able to even realize it exists. In socionics it’s called Point of Least Resistance (PoLR). It is an area of knowledge where we are least competent, we cannot make a clear judgement of the situation, evaluate it or produce our own point of view regarding a question in this area. As if it wasn’t miserable enough we also show complete inability to learn anything in this field apart from learning from own experience.

In a way our mind is smarter than we think it is, cause it hides our PoLR from everyone including ourselves. It’s actually awesome, because when somebody hits that spot of yours it is VERY-VERY unpleasant. We all had this experience when we say something and we see the effect like we just punched this person in a gut: he stares at you, opens his mouth but no sound is coming out, he looks lost, disoriented and super uncomfortable. When the sound finally comes out all we can hear is a complete nonsense, some bits of information which are completely illogical, weird and often out of subject. It may be funny to watch, but definitely not funny to feel.

When someone hits your PoLR you feel that you are suddenly completely stoned. You cannot say a word and barely have thoughts in your head, its all just one big cotton ball inside of your head and it makes you very insecure. You feel that you look silly, standing there and not being able to squeeze out at least an attempt of a come back, but cannot do anything with that. The only thing you know for sure is that the person in front of you is definitely unpleasant and you will try to avoid him from now on. Needless to say that if any smallest inquiry on that subject triggers such a reaction, its barely possible for us to learn something in this area of knowledge. To learn you need to discover, to discover you need to dig deeper, once you try to dig your mind says: “OUCH!!!”, you quickly back off and come back to square one.

Because of such intolerance to any thought of that subject we don’t present it as our weakness either. So when asked we will name our second or third weakest function indeed. There we have enough courage to analyze ourselves and conclude that we aren’t experts. We accept and even ask for help in those matters – by the way it can be a marker when we are identifying one’s socio type. People tend to ask for help in 2 areas, which are represented by 5th and 6th functions.

In my next post I will talk about what to do when someone hits your weakest spot and whether we can learn to strengthen it.